Gods and Heroes Impressions

Share.

By Joe 'Steejee' West

One of Sony Online Entertainment's notable upcoming online properties is the mythology inspired Gods and Heroes. The simplest description I can offer for this game is that it is Dungeon Siege in MMO fasion. That is, you are the hero, and your merry band of compatriots that you pick up along the road help you out. As the hero, you are, of course, totally awesome, in this case the child of a God. The Gods are quite frisky, so there's going to be a fair number of divine bastard children running around if the game takes off.

Your minions act as your party. As you move up the levels, you can find and unlock new minions, including some rather epic minions, through small side stories and challenges. Your choice of minions not only defines your party behavior in the obvious way of stacking and balancing classes and roles, but also through the bonuses certain minions bestow on your group, allowing you to further customize your party behavior.

You choose and improve your minions at your private camp on the Ethereal Plains in the shadow of Mount Olympus. Here you can upgrade a group of NPCs armor or weapons via the smith (in an RTS style, so several minions at once instead of excessive micro), grab some quests from special quest givers, or prepare a new party. The camp acts as Gods and Heroes housing system in effect. While at first the camp will be static (aside from new minions showing up), SOE plans to add customization, decorations, and the ability to invite other players into your camp.

Minions you leave in camp don't gain XP when you're out adventuring, so they could easily be left behind. They will gain XP at an accelerated rate if they are below your level, so catching them up shouldn't be too bad. Since the release level cap will be 40, that's not too many levels to pull your lazy minions up through if you decide to change your preferred party.

In group play, the minions add an interesting dynamic to the game, as depending on the location you can end up with several players together, each with their standard four minions. That means, if you partied up with four other people to do a dungeon that allows for the normal four minions, you'd end up with a small army of 25 units controlled by five players. SOE says they may tweak with this formula to increase or decrease the number of minions each player can bring for certain dungeons, resulting in a wide variety of possible dungeon setups. At launch, SOE plans to have three 'Elder' dungeons, which will act as the top of the high end to go against.

On that note, the game is a predominantly PvE game. No random ganking in Gods and Heros, though it is likely there will be competative play of some kind.

Combat is uses the fairly standard 'no collision detection, LOS only' sort of MMORPG combat, but has a fairly large variety of active usable skills. SOE talked about high action combat: bosses and creatures that do more than just whack at you with a fairly standard set of animations. Instead, foes that will do things such as physically pick you up, jerk you around, and throw you. Foes that will run you throw with a spear and lift you in the air still impailed on the spear, etc. As a result, boss fights look like they could have an extra unique sheen to them resulting from seeing new animations for both your character and the boss for these specific fights. The fights they showed with these elements did look pretty awesome visually, with characters reacting to the special attacks in a more appropriate fashion, rather than having one of three standard hit animations play.

Outside of prebuilt PvE, SOE plans to have large scale events regularly, and have a few of the original Ultima Online live event planners on staff working on these events. They feel, and I agree with them on this, that while most people won't be able to attend the majority of events, and some people may not be able to attend any, that the events add an extra level of excitement to the game and keep it feeling fresh.

You'll be limited to eight characters per shard, which are estimated to likely end up in the two to three thousand consecutive players supported range. SOE may change the characters per shard, but they're not apparently concerned about limiting people. After all, storage is cheap and people like toying around with setups. SOE does not plan to put a hard cap on areas, but is investigating options such as 'partial instancing' to prevent excess load, possibly something like Earth and Beyond's cloned zones, where multiple instances of the same zone exist. Zones themselves are fairly large and each represent a large chunk of a heavily modified ancient Roman empire.

Overall, the game looks like it could be pretty fun. While not spectacular graphically, it does look pretty good and the artists have done a good job on character detail and animation. The mythological setting is unique to MMOs, and the fact you won't have to always find some healbot to work for you is a plus.

Gods and Heroes is currently in closed beta and has a planned launch of Fall 07.